“Isn’t it always?” She forced herself to open her clenched fingers. “Tell me Betsy sent you from AA and this is all a really bad metaphor.”
“I wish I could.”
“Just do,” she urged him.
His lips twisted as if to hide a twinge of pain—or maybe a smile. “My sins are many, but lying is not among them.”
He twitched back the edge of his trench coat and from the folds of supple leather released a blackened club the size of her forearm. With a snap of his wrist and the menacing shhick of sliding metal, the club telescoped to double in length. He flicked it outward, and from the thickened, studded end, a blade cascaded out in a series of glittering steel segments, like a cardsharp’s precisely fanned hand almost twice as wide as her spread fingers.
From primitive club to switchblade battle-axe quicker than her stuttering heart could find its beat.
“Oh God.” She cringed back against the wall.
“I never got around to naming it.” He gripped the weapon just below the wickedly recurved blade and tugged up the sleeves of his coat and shirt.
The razor edge carved the cold light, sharper than the look he threw her as he laid the gleaming blade against the inside of his right arm between the inky lines of his tattoo.
“No.” A sickening beat of horror skipped through her, in the same way as when she’d seen the SUV hurtling toward her, about to change her life forever.
The tattoo, neither Celtic nor tribal but even more primitive, swirled over his knuckles and spiked halfway up his arm. Against the black, the skin of his wrist looked tender, veins and tendons standing out in marbled relief.
He stilled, and despite the dread-filled thump of her heart, she found her gaze drawn to his.
“Unforgivably melodramatic,” he said, “but effectively convincing.”
He sliced the blade down his inner arm. Blood foun tained up behind the silvery edge into a gruesome rooster tail.
With a wordless cry, she jumped forward. A sweep of her elbow knocked the axe from his grasp.
The momentum of her leap sent them both tumbling to the pavement. He swore as his back hit the ground with a jolt.
She straddled him, both hands clamped on the terrible injury, stemming the inexorable outflow of life. Her heart raced, matching each gushing pump of blood from his wrist.
“Sera.”
“Are you crazy?” Was she? He’d had an axe, for God’s sake. She tried not to wonder if the weapon was far enough from his reach, if he would use it again, this time on her. “I can’t let go of you.”
“If so, you would be the first.”
The glimmer of old pain in his gaze ensnared her. But each heartbeat she spent wondering, another pulse of his blood eked between her fingers. “Shut up unless you’re going to make sense. We have to tourniquet your arm. Damn it, why don’t I have a scarf?”
“Sera, let go.”
Her stomach twisted. “I feared I was trying to kill myself, but I guess you beat me to it.”
“’Tis harder than you’d think.” His voice was soft, and he shifted under her, his thighs hard between her knees. “Sera, please.”
His tone made her pause. She was practically molesting him, something she hadn’t quite gotten around to with his doppelganger. He was too big for her to restrain, too sensibly calm and level eyed for her to tell herself he was totally nuts. Adrenaline ebbed, leaving her dazed.
“I already know you’re not a healer,” he said. “You’re a guide. You of all people should understand release from pain can be dearer than life.”
She shook her head, slowly at first, then with more vigor. “Who told you that? That’s not why . . .”
“Let go.”
“Damn you.” She did.
Only a tracing of scar remained. The white line gleamed like pearl beneath the transecting smears of blood left by her fingers. She gasped and stumbled back.
“Easy.” He reached out to steady her.
She evaded him, as if by avoiding his hand she could ignore what she’d just seen. “It’s a trick.”
“All demon-kind delight in trickery.” He swept his hand over the scar, smearing her fingerprints into his skin, then folded the axe away and rose to his feet. “But I have not tricked you. Your possession will be hard enough without fear and doubt undermining you. Trust me on that.”
He tucked the club back into the folds of his coat and held his hand down to her.
“Trust you?” She clenched her fist, sticky with his blood. If she refused to listen to him, then she couldn’t believe her own senses either, which would mean she was broken in ways beyond the damage of a speeding SUV. That possibility was more frightening than anything he’d said. This time, the collision course was between what she’d known before and . . . “Possession?”
“The demon came to you. You let it in.”
“I didn’t know it was a demon.” Just saying the word made her feel as if she were playing on the flip side of sanity. “I can’t believe I’m listening to you.” But she took his hand.
He drew her to her feet. He stared down at their matched bloody hands a moment, then released her. “Remember what I said about believing? You’re already going through the first symptoms of possession as the demon metastasizes. Your anger and blackouts, the sensation that you’ve been cut off from everything you’ve ever known.” The gray lake and sky cast a silvery pall over his eyes.
His distant, pensive expression made him seem too . . . too much like her. She curled her fingers tight against the urge to touch him again, to recall his focus from the empty horizon.
He continued. “You’ll tell yourself you’re losing your mind, that you’re embroiled in a government conspiracy, whatever makes you feel better.” The silver haze hardened to bronze again as he looked back at her. “But when the demon ascends, you can reject my words and die. Or listen to me and just maybe survive.”
“Survive possession.”
“And what comes after. Now the demon travels this world in your flesh, and when its influence rises, you draw unnatural power through the residual link to its realm.”
“That’s how I knocked the axe out of your hand.”
“I was momentarily distracted.” He glowered at her beneath lowered brows. “It won’t happen again.”
She couldn’t stop a quick grin at his disgruntlement. Then she thought about what he was saying, and her grin faded. “There’s psychological degradation as well?”
Up went one brow. “Like homicidal schizophrenia?”
She winced to hear the accusation she’d thrown at him on the bridge tossed back like an armed grenade. “Like voices in your head, telling you to do things.”
“The hierarchies in both other-realms are great believers in free will. Free, right up till you discover the price.” He waved his tattooed hand dismissively. “You’re still in the driver’s seat. Only now you have a passenger. A silent passenger, possibly with a gun to your head, who’s supercharged your vehicle for his own mysterious purpose and won’t let you go. But you’re not a puppet.”
If she turned her focus inward, would she feel this otherworldly passenger? The thought made her want to crawl out of her skin. But it was her skin, damn it. “You describe it like a parasite.”
“Technically, symbiont. The demon doesn’t just take. It gives. Technically.”
The last was muttered under his breath, and she studied him, wondering whom he was trying to convince.
He shifted beneath her regard. “A weakness in your soul made you vulnerable to a demon matching itself to the emptiness in you.”
“I wasn’t weak or empty,” she protested. “At least not until . . .”
This time, he studied her as she fell silent. Bad enough she’d sometimes felt her body, her mind, her very future, were casual stakes in a poker game where she hadn’t been invited. Now it seemed her soul was in the pot too.